Tag Archives: Internet

As most of you would be aware Facebook’s promised awesomeness turned out to be a one-to-one video chatting feature. Now is that really innovative ? It is something that has already been introduced since almost a decade by companies now vanished. Of the barely surviving companies, ICQ introduced video chatting in 2007. In fact, for some inexplicable reason, I always feel ICQ was precursor of Twitter in a way. Going back to video-chatting, the much-touted Google+ Hangout feature isn’t the first group video chat either. I remember at least one service, ICU , which had similar features, then Yahoo Messenger + Public Chat + Group are so similar to the phenomenon that is now termed as Social Networking.

From the looks of it, Google‘s latest foray into social web, in the form of +1 button might end up with same fate as its predecessors. In case you are unaware,it is the button at the top with +1 caption which according to Google official blog is digital shorthand for “this is pretty cool” is the search engine giant’s reply to Facebook “Like”. The fact that Google replies with a sentence like “this is pretty cool” to Facebook’s four letter “Like” may give us a rare insight on the mindset prevalent within Google’s team. The 2 character button itself may conform to the Web 2.0 trends,the descriptive sentence makes one wonder if they have embraced Web 2.0 with all their hearts or are just going along with the tide. This would also explain why Google continues to fail in getting a foothold in Social Web. Anyway, I am getting ahead of myself 😛 the pertinent to ask at this point of time is whether +1 is really going to be successful or not.